As we do each month, ESET has released its monthly threat report. As you might expect, there were a lot of Conficker detections out there. There were also almost as many detections for autorun threats that are not Conficker. In other words, if you have disabled autorun, then you protect against a lot more than

Larry Seltzer, one of the better commentators on malware issues, has picked up on the disparity between ESET’s naming of the latest variant and Symantec’s – they call it W32.Downadup.E. Richard Adhikari (who also seems to pretty clueful) also picked up on the naming issue when we exchanged emails a few days ago. This issue

So now for a little more tech detail on Win32/Conficker.AQ (kindly supplied by Juraj Malcho at our labs in Europe – however, if I get anything wrong, that will almost certainly be down to my faulty interpretation!) The new variant has two main components. The server component is an .EXE that infects vulnerable PC’s in

If you just got here looking for my blog on Conficker and "blended hoaxes", I’m afraid I just pulled it (temporarily at least) in the light of new data that’s come in since last night: I don’t want to mislead anyone, as it seems that the new Conficker stuff is a lot more active and

Talking of the C-worm ("Will no-one rid me of this troublesome malware?") I mentioned in a blog from a couple of days ago that Jose Nazario supplied some useful information on an issue I was checking into. The issue concerned reports from a Russian news site of Distributed Denial of Service attacks on Russian sites:

If it was the intention of the Conficker gang to create a huge splash, they succeeded. (In fact, it’s quite possible that they’ve attracted more attention than they really wanted.) In any case, it seems that lots of people are looking nervously over their shoulders for any indication that something unpleasant and Conficker-related is about

We all have recently endured a week or so of extensive media hype about a worm called “Conficker”. Phrases such as “One of the worst viruses ever” and other such nonsense were tossed around like promises at a political rally, with about the same level of honesty and accuracy, perhaps even less. Conficker was already

I wondered why a newsletter from “Windows Secrets” got flagged as spam. It is because they have reduced themselves to as much. Near the top of the newsletter it proclaimed: Remove the Conficker worm: register now Conficker is one of the worst viruses in history and has infected over 15 million PCs. We are offering

Good morning. Is there anyone still out there and connected? Thought so. While one or two people who comment here seem to think I’m personally responsible for developing, maintaining, and marketing ESET products (and in at least one case writing the malware as well) I’m afraid I didn’t spend April 1st crouched over a rack

I’ve tried to convince you all that you really need to watch out for all of the threats and that it really isn’t worth worrying about Conficker, but if you are still worried about Conficker we do have a knowledge base article you can peruse at http://kb.eset.com/esetkb/index?page=content&id=SOLN2209. If you apply your security patches, disable autorun,

I kept telling everyone to worry about being secure, not about Conficker. Some people listen, some don’t. So what happened over about the past 24 hours? According to ESET’s ThreatSense.Net, by about 2 PM GMT on April 1st, of the top 20 threats encountered by our users in the past 24 hours, four out of

So, nothing happened? Well, yes. Our labs, who’ve been monitoring carefully, note that Conficker changed communication protocols, just as the code said it would. No doubt in the fullness of time, the botnet will start doing what botnets do: it would be bizarre to put this much effort into a project and then not try

…as I write, it’s past midnight here in the UK. In some parts of the world it’s already been April 1st for nearly 14 hours. I have yet to hear any reports of melted PCs, disappearing internets, or institutions DDoS-ed into insolvency by Conficker. I’ve just received email from a colleague in Sydney, where it’s business as

In an apparent effort to cause British commuters to miss their trains, Chinese hackers have ordered the Conficker.C botnet to randomly change the time on the venerable and vulnerable Big Ben. This has caused millions of Londoners to be late for work this morning. Hey, this is no more ridiculous than trying to protect against

I can already hear a chorus of "Not ANOTHER Conficker blog?", but some of you will want to know about this development. The Honeynet Project has announced a new scanning tool for detecting Conficker, which gives network and system administrators a very handy extra tool for detecting Conficker activity on their networks. Furthermore, the tool

Around the end of the last decade, when I was working for a research organization in the UK, I used to write a monthly column on security for an in-house newspaper, and was rapped over the knuckles for telling this little story. I’ve probably changed the detail since then: I don’t keep everything I’ve written

[Update: it seems that people who missed the whole MS-DOS/having fun with the C> prompt and batchfiles thing are still struggling with the fact that vendors are releasing cleaning tools that are really command-line tools, so some step-by-step notes are added below.] I’m sure you’re almost as bored with this issue as I am with the

This wouldn’t normally be the place to discuss the ongoing decline of the fortunes of the British Government, but there have been several IT-security-related stories coming out of the Mother of Parliaments worth a closer look. Back on March 10th, The Register reported that MP (Member of Parliament) Alun Michael had reported to the police that he

I don’t, of course, know for sure what’s going to happen on April 1st, when Conficker is timed, potentially, to go to its next stage of evolution. We do know, from inspecting code in the variants and subvariants that have come our way, that infected machines will be looking for instructions and updates on that date. At the very least,

It appears there are interesting developments in the Conficker/Downadup development front. Peter Coogan of Symantec describes here a variant that doesn’t appear to be interested in infecting new machines, rather more so in updating and protecting itself on systems already infected with previous variants. (And, yes, ESET’s ThreatSense technology does already detect it heuristically!) It seems to have